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It is more than obvious as most of the previous posts mentioned and Michael's article that the current Beta Catalyst Linux driver isn't ready for these cards in many critical areas. That's why no samples for Linux, they knew that embarrassment would come for the cards in tests. R9 290 is far more powerful than GTX 680 in hardware specs!

Expected by me cause I have a feeling that AMD puts much more effort in making new hardware designs than coding for finetuned drivers and in my opinion this is obvious for windows Catalyst driver also! I believe it has problems there too, less but there are certainly bugs present.

Obviously GCN differs very much than the older archs used in HD 5000/6000 cards and we are witnessing the same phenomenon like in Mesa with R600 and RadeonSI drivers, inside Catalyst's code base.
Power consumption is a big problem... Heat is also if it passes through the card to the rest of the box components and raises the overall system's temperatures.

Another small notice I want to make is the CPU bottleneck situation found on Source games here is perfectly clear that it is present also at the much more expensive and "more powerful" I7 4770K CPU than the shy and cheap in comparison AMD FX 8350. Paragraph conclusion FX 8350 worths much more than the overpriced 4770 I7 at the end of the day...

AMD takes a bit of revenge in openCL tests where nvidia (driver and hardware) seems to be thrown out of the water but that is not enough for AMD to turn heads at their side in Linux rising gaming stuff...

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You mentioned in your conclusion that you were not able to tell whether the clock speed down-clocked from heat due to the CCC not displaying it. You could have used the --odgc command to monitor the clocks.
That is how I currently monitor the clocks on my R9-290X. Therefore it should also work with the R9-290.

To record while a benchmark is happening, you can use a combination of the "watch" command and the controlFlow ">>" to redirect the output and append to a file per interval.

Code:

watch aticonfig --odgc >> clocksPer2Sec.txt

With my R9-290X running on Uber mode, it tends to downclock once it reaches 92-94 C.

With Metro LL with the slider-settings maxed to the right, I observe mostly FPS between 40+ to 60+. On the surface levels with the massive storm on the bridge and the last climax level; I observe FPS of 30 to 50+.
I also observed that I could use CCC to overide the Anti Aliasing to maximum with EQ and using Edge Detect; however on levels with a lot happening, like the last climax level, the game frequently crashes. Switching to enhancing the applications AA instead of overriding it virtually eliminated the crashing.

On another note, something I found peculiar; Serious Sam BFE with ULTRA everything for performance settings, would heat up the card faster and throttle down the clocks faster than Metro LL. It was like running Furmark.

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You mentioned in your conclusion that you were not able to tell whether the clock speed down-clocked from heat due to the CCC not displaying it. You could have used the --odgc command to monitor the clocks.
That is how I currently monitor the clocks on my R9-290X. Therefore it should also work with the R9-290.

No, the OverDrive clock information wasn't displayed correctly for the GPU on the driver.

PTS already has full support for realtime clock monitoring so I can just run:

MONITOR=gpu.freq phoronix-test-suite benchmark xxx and it will plot me real-time clock data on all the different Linux drivers, but the OverDrive information wasn't being reported for the R9 290.

If for some reason , a 3rd party cooling solution for example tries to make it run cooler, the driver/card pushes performance till card reaches again that temperatures....OTOH, if a cooling solution is inefficient and card wants to push over 95ºC, performance of card is cut.

So it's all good for those of us that have the skill to build a liquid cooling setup out of a car radiator then.

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We're entering summer here down under in a couple of weeks. I've decided to customise the cooling of R9-290X so it can perform better under the Aussie heat.

Unfortunately all the after-market air-coolers take more than 2 slots. I can only afford two slots as all the other slots are taken up by cards.
I emailed Sapphire, Gigabyte, HIS and XFX if they were willing to sell me their custom coolers once they are released and so far only Sapphire has responded with a flat no advising I will have to buy another card.

So looks like I will have to go watercooling again. I've been trying to avoid watercooling as the last one I did (4yrs ago) was too high maintenance and restrictive (due to tubing and fittings all around the place, harder to just pull stuff out and replace/experiment/tweak). Also now I got barely any room within my case due to a Noctua D14. oh well, I suppose I'll end up enjoying the "tinkering-around" once I start it.

Another option, I just sell it now and recover as much as I can and get a 780 Ti. LoL

But, I'm betting AMD will come out in force with the cavalry from 1H of next year due to market forces from the ubiquitous SteamOS/SteamMachines. And eventually Mantle enabled and supported games on Linux...

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Something tells me they're waiting for Mantle to be ready as well. For now Hawai are under testing for Windows so that we get a better software product, yeah i know wishfull thinking. They probably just forgot =(

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I currently have a GTX 570. When I upgrade sometime in the future, I want to buy an AMD card and use the open source drivers. How soon do you guys think I can do so and see similar if not better performance from an AMD card that came after the GTX 570?

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So looks like I will have to go watercooling again. I've been trying to avoid watercooling as the last one I did (4yrs ago) was too high maintenance and restrictive (due to tubing and fittings all around the place, harder to just pull stuff out and replace/experiment/tweak).

As someone who has experimented A LOT with water cooling there are a couple of tips I can give you:

These things really make much more simple to play around, upgrade, plug/unplug, extend, etc.

Use large diameters, thick wall tubes of good quality. Large inner diameter (9mm and up. ~⅓" I think) make more flow and less resistance/pressure in the tubes. Large outer diameters (12mm and up. ~½" ) makes sure that the tube is solid and won't tear. The quick-coupling adapters I've given as an example above use such wide tubing.

Use dual pumps in serie. That keeps more flow, and in case of 1 pump failing you still have the other one preventing the PC from melting. My setups used either 2x Lain DDC, or Innovatek HPPS + pump immersed in reservoir.

If you want to use a flow meter, use one with the least resistance (big internal diameter of the channel).

Also now I got barely any room within my case due to a Noctua D14. oh well, I suppose I'll end up enjoying the "tinkering-around" once I start it.

Well the good part with water cooling is that you can keep the bulk of the mass (radiator and reservoir) away from the heat source (away as in "out of the case", eventually with a long tube in between. If you go for the dual pumps as I'm suggesting, pressure and flow won't be a problem even with some distance).

I use radiator/reservoir hybrids, like the first serie of Zalman's reserators (The tall towers) or Kailon (a little bit less happy about the noise). That gives a lot of exchange surface without taking space inside the case (and as a bonus, these have a pump immersed inside, so you only need to think getting 1 extra pump).
I also put as many radiators on the out-take fan grills of the case as possible (Black Ice are my current favourite). If you choose big enough radiators of good enough quality, you may end up having way much more exchange surface than the typical in-case fan-cooled radiator. You can probably reach the same performance as your current monster, but without taking 99% of the free space. (Which in turn allows more air flow inside the case to help cooling the other components). I end-up with a rather spacious case, with the big honking radiators hanging on the outside.

Another option, I just sell it now and recover as much as I can and get a 780 Ti. LoL

Find someone into alt-coin mining. AMD GPUs are good on Scrypt-based alt-coins (Litecoin and Co).

But, I'm betting AMD will come out in force with the cavalry from 1H of next year due to market forces from the ubiquitous SteamOS/SteamMachines. And eventually Mantle enabled and supported games on Linux...

Well GCN 2.0 will probably more innovative and less incremental than GCN 1.1. Don't forget also that the other consoles too are using AMD hardware under the hood sa that's extra R&D that will eventually find its way into future Radeon products.

But I wouldn't bet on Mantle. 3D graphics are better served a completely cross-platform multi-vendor API, like OpenGL. Mantle would put is back into the 3dfx Glide days.

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If anyone wants a little relief from the heat of one of these, you can remove the heatsink and do a careful application of thermal compound. It will still run at 95C, but it will be able to run a little faster. Note that this will probably void your warranty.

Like this. I'm surprised they picked that thermal compound, because they had run a big thermal compound comparison, and the best performance on their test GPU was with the Coollaboratory Liquid Metal Pad.